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Is Your Content Killer? It’s Your Last Chance To Submit For the 2020 Killer Content Awards

Nominations for the 2020 Killer Content Awards close this Friday, November 1, so now’s the time to spotlight your company’s most creative campaigns and its top-performing content assets. Winners will be celebrated at an exclusive reception during the B2B Marketing Exchange, to be held Feb. 24-26, 2020 in Scottsdale, Ariz. A select number of companies will also participate in panel discussions across the event program, which features tactical tracks focused on content strategy, demand generation, account-based marketing and sales. 

Since its inception in 2012, the Killer Content Awards has spotlighted some of the most innovative brands in content marketing: from Glassdoor to LinkedIn, Sigstr, SAP and so much more. This year, the program has 19 categories in order to represent new trends and delivery channels. They include: 

  1. Measurable ROI
    A piece of content or broader campaign that has made a measurable impact on bottom-line results.
  2. Multi-Touch Campaign
    Innovative approaches to multichannel or omnichannel campaign design that leverage compelling content that resonates with buyers on a deeper level and spurs action.
  3. Nurture Campaign
    Nurture campaigns and associated content that deliver stellar results in terms of leads generated, opportunities created and deals closed.
  4. Customer Lifecycle Marketing
    Campaigns that extend beyond the traditional “buyer’s journey,” and include content designed to drive ongoing engagement, customer retention, and loyalty.
  5. Account-Based Marketing Campaign
    Content and campaign experiences tailored to key accounts and segments.
  6. Buyer-Focused Content
    Examples of impactful and memorable buyer-focused content and/or stories of how brands have successfully transitioned from product-focused content to a buyer-focused strategy.
  7. Sales Enablement Content
    Powerful and creative approaches to content and campaigns used to inform and empower internal sales teams. Stellar results a plus.
  8. Channel Partner Marketing
    Brands that have created content designed to go to and through partners in order to generate greater revenue through the channel.
  9. Research-Based Content
    Content or campaigns crafted based on proprietary or third-party research.
  10. Short-Form Content
    A creative and compelling approach to any short-form asset, such as an infographic, video, quiz and checklist, among others.
  11. Interactive Content
    Creative and successful approaches to interactive content formats, such as quizzes, assessments, reportsand more.
  12. Influencer Campaign
    Short- and long-term initiatives that have successfully leveraged industry thought leaders and experts to generate brand awareness and word-of-mouth.
  13. Video Content
    Standalone videos and/or a video series that tells a compelling story from the brand or buyer’s perspective. Successfully drives awareness for a brand or specific product.
  14. Social Amplification
    Brands that have taken innovative approaches to content promotion via social channels and/or have created unique content for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and others.
  15. Design Concept/Theme
    A piece of content or broader campaign that tacks on to a current event/trend or leverages a creative visual approach or theme to capture buyer attention.
  16. Packaged/Bundled Content
    Content that is packaged together or curated to create an immersive — and even personalized — content experience.
  17. Agency Partnership
    Successful content and campaigns created in partnership with an agency. For this category, both the agency and brand will be recognized for their ability to collaborate and innovate.
  18. Publisher Partnership
    Successful content and derivative resources created in partnership with a third-party publisher or publication.
  19. Cause Marketing
    A marketing campaign or initiative designed to raise awareness for a specific cause, and/or raises funds for a charity or foundation.

Submit your nominations now to give your brand, and your team, the praise they deserve! 

Marketing Automation Must Give Way To Marketing Orchestration

1marcjohnsonThe sales and marketing industry has exploded over the past decades, prospering thanks to marketing automation tools, digital advertising and the widespread availability of data. While these tools all come with the promise of making marketers’ lives easier, what they actually deliver is the ability to intrude on individuals’ daily habits, at an unchecked pace. Add in the unrelenting pressure for businesses to grow and we find ourselves in a world in which sales and marketing have run amok.

People are bombarded with 10,000 messages a day. Americans received 26.3 billion robocalls in 2018, and 82% feel that online ads are disruptive. The backlash from both consumers (adblocking) and governments (GDPR, CPA) is real. The advertising industry has a bad name, to say the least, and the old ways of operating are numbered.

In the face of all this, CMOs have no choice but to evolve past a mentality of unrestricted attempts to engage. Modern marketing and sales can’t survive the current “more is better,” take-no-prisoners-approach. It needs to abandon the current process that tries anything (email, ad, call, direct mail, event) possible to get human attention and move toward a more curated, selective approach. That doesn’t mean abandoning the tools that are widely used today. It simply requires a more thoughtful, restrained, orchestrated approach to using those tools.

Automation Accelerates Intrusion, Orchestration Harmonizes Attention

Orchestration means moving away from automating single tools and components, toward having all of the different marketing and sales elements running off of the same data and talking to each other. For as much as marketing and sales have invested in technology and data sources, they often still operate in silos. This approach opens the door for miscommunication and misaligned strategy throughout the organization. Hunger for growth, without a unified plan, means a marketer hits the same prospects again and again, creating untold brand damage.

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Orchestration is the actual alignment of all sales and marketing activities, which has often been promised but never really delivered in the digital world. It’s about actually aligning around what the consumer needs and what the prospect is interested in — while resisting the extraneous.

When those criteria become the core of a marketing and sales approach, the focus shifts to the quality of interactions, not quantity. Delivering targeted messages at scale is easy at this point in time. Delivering effective messages — those that resonate and help — without wasting ad dollars or contributing to the disastrous ad pollution takes time, skill, discipline and data.

Moving in this direction marks the beginning of the end for marketing-qualified leads and tactics such as acquiring contacts and “just getting names in the door.” Those tactics have been dying for a long time, true. But orchestration is also a move away from intrusive activities such as large scale “nurture” (also known as “nag”) email, to more passive brand and awareness building. It’s giving up on disruption and moving back to the basics of advertising.

In a way, we’re describing the Jerry Maguire “fewer clients, less money” mission statement. Ask, as Jerry did, “Who’s coming with me?” in a room full of marketers, and you might get a similar response. This approach is counter-intuitive, yet it is the only way for marketing and sales to survive. Less truly is more.

Salesforce Unveils Intelligent Content, Interactive & Productivity Updates To Email Offering

Salesforce announced new email features and functionality for its Marketing Cloud offering that aim to help marketers better personalize campaigns and improve overall customer engagement. Specifically, the announcement includes new Einstein features baked into the email marketing tool, interactive email functionality and productivity updates to help streamline campaign creation.

Content Marketing & Demand Gen: Make The Synergy, Make The Sale

Paul Heald Headshot

Content is king at the moment. But if an engaging webinar, white paper or video appears and hardly anyone sees it, what’s the point?

Although content creation and demand generation teams share the goal of attracting customers and boosting sales, they work in distinct ways. Demand gen staffers work closely with sales teams, focusing on understanding and winning over the audience they’re trying to reach at any given time. Content marketers often take a longer view, telling their brand’s story through an ongoing narrative guided by their company’s overarching product strategy.  

Lola.com CMO Jeanne Hopkins: ‘Customer Marketing Should Be The Meta’

1jeanne

Ongoing discussions around customer-centricity in the B2B world have led to an ever-important question: who should own the customer experience? Thought leaders throughout the industry say marketing is best positioned to own the customer experience, which can lead to unified messaging across all the major departments within a business.

Invoca Secures $56M In Latest Funding Round

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Invoca has raised $56 million in new capital, bringing the company's total financing to date to $116 million. The AI-powered call tracking and conversational analytics company plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and broaden its partners in digital advertising, marketing technology, CRM and affiliate marketing.

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